Debating
One of the first skills a new member masters is the ability to debate and engage in a meaningful, constructive dialogue, even when perspectives or interests differ greatly. What is more, we do require candidates for membership to have a firm grasp on the concepts of respecting debate partners and healthy debate culture. Discussion and debate are as fundemental parts of diplomacy as they are for everyday life, thus we seek to hone and perfect them with every chance, opportunity or conference we encounter.
Learning
Knowing is half the battle, and we prefer to triumph in our battles… or debates. Being a skilled diplomat requires more than the innate ability to convince – with silver-tongued words – an audience of your views or persuade your adversaries on following the best course of action. Such feats require vast amount of knowledge of the world and people. With the necessary information and resources at your disposal, anything is possible. That is why we, here in IDSA, put great emphasis on sharing our experiences and knowledge. From international conferences, through presentations by acclaimed professionals of their given field of interest, to nights of debate framed by UN modelling… we engage in all to learn.
Thinking
One’s own thoughts form the core of one’s understanding of the world; it is how we perceive and evaluate the events, phenomena and other people shaping the course of history. It has been a central idea for many philosophers over the ages and it is a philosophy IDSA wholeheartedly endorses. That is why we encourage our members to approach articles of interest from multiple sides: the more diverse thoughts they gather to analyse, the better their understanding of the underlying, root causes of a situation will be – and the greater their comprehension of the world’s structure will become. While opinions are becoming less and less appreciated in the frantic pursuit of one, objective truth, we try to listen and collect each and every individual idea to construct the most beneficial consensus.